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METAGEUM '07
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Conference session: Animism, Agency and Altered Styles of Communication:
Book now for whole or part of the Metageum event. |
About Dr Robert J Wallis
Dr Robert J Wallis is Associate Professor of Visual Culture and Associate Director of the MA in Art History at Richmond University in London, as well as an Associate Lecturer with the Open University.
He previously coordinated the MA course Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art and lectured in the archaeology of art and representation in the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton.
He is co-director of the Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights (www.sacredsites.org.uk): Contemporary Pagan Engagements with the Past project, and co-founder of the Ulfhednar Heathen Companions group based in Hampshire, England.
His research interests include indigenous and prehistoric art, particularly in shamanistic communities, and the re-presentation of the past in the present, especially by contemporary pagans and neo-shamans.
Publications
Wallis is the author of Shamans / neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans (Routledge 2003, short-listed for the Folklore Society Prize 2003), and the co-author of The Historical Dictionary of Shamanism (Scarecrow Press 2007), Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights: Contemporary Pagan Engagements with Archaeological Monuments (Sussex Academic Press 2007) and Galdrbok: Practical Heathen Runecraft, Shamanism and Magic (Wykeham Press 2005). He co-edited A Permeability of Boundaries: New Approaches to the Archaeology of Art, Religion and Folklore (Oxford BAR 2001) and has contributed papers to the volumes The Archaeology of Shamanism (Routledge 2001), Shamanism: A Reader (Routledge 2002) and Researching Paganisms (2004). He has been published in such journals as World Archaeology (2000), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2002), Journal of Material Culture (2004) and Journal of Ritual Studies (2006), and has produced numerous book reviews and encyclopaedia entries.
At Metageum '07
Animism, Agency and Altered Styles of Communication:
On being a heathen archaeologist of visual and material culture
My research to date has engaged with shamanism and altered consciousness in the context of rock art studies and the study of contemporary paganisms. In the case of the former, I examined rock art in Melanesia, Namibia and Britain, and offered a critical analysis of the shamanistic approach to rock art or so-called ‘trance hypothesis’ (e.g. Wallis 2002). Regarding the latter, I explored the interface between indigenous, prehistoric and western shamanistic practitioners (Wallis 2003), and as co-director of the Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights project (www.sacredsites.org.uk) considered contemporary pagan engagements with the past at prehistoric monuments in Britain (e.g. Blain & Wallis 2007).
I have always been explicit and upfront about how my academic interest is integrated with my personal practices as a heathen (a practitioner of Northern spirituality): far from being a liability or compromising my ‘objectivity’, I have argued that this practitioner-scholar position offers a unique standpoint alongside other ‘established’ approaches, with its own contribution (and of course difficulties) to scholarship. Here, I discuss the permeability of boundaries between my various (research and pagan) interests pertaining to ‘the megalithic mind’, by introducing recent theorizing of animism and its implications for our understanding of ‘sacred sites’, for our approaches to prehistoric cognition and visual and material culture, and for my own worldview. My concern is not to argue for how ‘the megalithic mind’ was constituted, but to consider how indigenous worldviews challenge western cognicentrism, with a relational animistic epistemology contributing to our understanding of megalithic sacred sites and associated rock art, focusing on examples from the British Isles.